December 2024: This month’s theme is Discernment and Leadings, examining individual and corporate practices for listening to our inner guide. We will read about how to recognize and act on leadings, Quaker process, proceeding as way opens, and the fallibility of conscience. Making space for expectant waiting in decision making and patching together an understanding of divine will with the help of Friends are Quaker superpowers.
“The query for this week is: How can we prepare the way for powerful ministry? This is a query I have been living into in my own life. I recently founded a nonprofit called Public Friends; the mission of Public Friends is ensuring the future of Friends in North America by supporting and developing Quaker ministers to a professional standard. My hope is that Public Friends will prepare the way for powerful ministry.”
“This may be what some modern Friends find unpalatable – that they may be asked to endure the prophetic or teaching ministry of gifted ministers who have actually been given permission by the meeting to tell us when we fall short in our faithfulness.”
“The first time you practice contemplation, you’ll only experience a darkness, like a cloud of unknowing. You won’t know what this is. You’ll only know that in your will you feel a simple reaching out to God. You must also know that this darkness and this cloud will always be between you and your God, whatever you do. They will always keep you from seeing God clearly by the light of understanding in your intellect and will block you from feeling God fully in the sweetness of love in your emotions.”
“Mary Magdalene has been called the Apostle to the Apostles because she was the first to share the good news of the Resurrection (John 20:17-18).”
“God is within her, she will not fall;
God will help her at break of day.”
The lovely Mary Dyer / With her eyes could start a fire. / And lovely lady Dyer / Could have called the law a liar. / Mary with her head held high. / Mary with her head held high.
November 25-December 1, 2024: This week’s messages are guest edited by Ashley M. Wilcox, Quaker minister, best-selling author of The Women’s Lectionary, and founder of Public Friends, a new nonprofit created to support Quaker ministers.
“My soul sings in gratitude. I’m dancing in the mystery of God. The light of the Holy One is within me and I am blessed, so truly blessed. This goes deeper than human thinking. I am filled with awe at Love whose only condition is to be received.”
“In my selections this month I tried to capture the holiness and messiness that closeness brings. We read about the power of spiritual friendships, and how friendship can become spiritual. That sexuality is a gift from God, which we are tasked with using with integrity. That marriage is a divine leading built on reciprocity. That we are our children’s first spiritual teachers. And that when we experience loss or loneliness, we are presented with the opportunity to enter into ‘deeper and more continual acquaintance with the unseen and eternal things.'”
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